Those initial loops are unsuccessful attempts to create a product people want to use. The problem is those loops can take months and/or millions of dollars to get through, and many startups never get there. But a startup can get through at least one or two of those loops quickly, in a matter of a few short weeks, by using a new concept called Monetizable Pain.

The Nice-To-Have

On paper, in hindsight, those loops look like failures. In practice, in the trenches, it’s never so obvious. The loops always start off sounding like a good idea full of possibility. But before long, after development and launch, it becomes apparent that while interesting, the product is somehow not necessary enough, or useful enough, to really build a business around, even if it’s well designed. It’s merely a nice-to-have product, one that addresses what Paul Ahlstrom and Nathan Furr, in their new book Nail It Then Scale It, call a “mosquito bite”.

Nice-to-have products are often wonderfully designed and work well. An example is scanR. They built a nice mobile app that turns the camera on your phone into a wireless document scanner. Users liked it. Unfortunately the team ran into challenges building a business around the concept. ScanR, like many smart, capable startups, found that “like” does not easily convert into “here’s my credit card number.” (Just ask any business trying to measure ROI on FaceBook “Likes”.)

The Must Have

The part of the curve on the right, where things are finally looking up, is where a startup has figured out how to offer a must-have. This part arrives when the company gets two things right at the same time:

It is now focused on monetizable pain – a problem that Furr and Ahlstrom refer to as a “shark bite”.

It is offering a solution that provides a direct, meaningful level of relief for that problem. (Without adding too many new hassles in the process.)

It’s important to note that a viable solution in the must-have part of the curve is not necessarily a mainstream product like the classic model in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Nonetheless, the product begins to sell, and/or the users begin to grow. In my first startup, NetMind, our first customers were Boeing, eBay, IBM and the CIA and I promise you they did not fit the classic profile of an “early adopter” who is tolerant of a crappy product. They were not remotely interested in bleeding edge, early stage solutions. But they had monetizable pain, and we had something that provided real (albeit small, initially) relief. So they bought it. And that began a long journey that eventually ended in an $800 million acquisition.

The Must-Have Shortcut

Most of the good startup wisdom out there, from Lean Startup, to Customer Development, to Y Combinator, emphasize engaging customers early by building something that offers the product concept or a product feature and then measuring customer/user response. This method is way smarter and faster than the old startup (and current big company) process of building out a real product and hoping users come. However, there is a first step that can get you to must-have and product/market fit even faster.

Validate Monetizable Pain First

Offering a minimum viable product is a fantastic way to learn what target customers want. I do it all the time. The only problem is the learnings you get don’t always lead to a breakthrough product focused on monetizable pain. The reason?

Monetizable pain is about the customer’s problem, not the startup’s product.

For that reason, the first step on the road to product/market fit for any startup is to go deep on the customer problem and test for monetizable pain before building anything.

The monetizable pain discovery and testing methodology is quite aligned with Customer Development, except we’ve found it’s very beneficial to work through the monetizable pain process before (rather than concurrently with) initial product development. While it sounds heretical to delay development, the reality is no proposed product spec has ever survived the monetizable pain discovery process. It’s a process that forces the entrepreneur to know more about the problem than any one target customer, and it turns out that 100% of all product visions change during this step. And the process of locking on to monetizable pain does not have to take long – if you do it right.

How to Validate Monetizable Pain

Validating monetizable pain requires a method for measuring the value of a problem. It requires the development of a reliable metric for customer problems. Unfortunately the well known business metrics don’t really help us because they have much more to do with the solution side of the equation. For instance, one obvious business metric is sales. Sales can measure the success of a product. But nobody buys problems. (They unfortunately arrive free of charge.)

One way to accurately measure a customer problem is to rely on this principle:

The value of a problem directly correlates to the time people will take to tell you about it.

Time and time again we find that if busy people, who fit your target customer profile, are willing to give you valuable time simply to discuss a particular problem, with no clear promise (yet) of a viable solution, then you have an important problem. The kind of problem a startup, with limited resources, no brand, an incomplete product and a small team can actually sell into.

My Favorite Test for Monetizable Pain in B2B

Our favorite (and most dramatic) monetizable pain test has been proven to work well across a number of different B2B market segments. The B2C tests are different and very interesting as well. The posts on those are coming.

This B2B test works like this:

Place a true cold call to your hypothetical target customer – meaning the actual role/title of the person in the big name brand you would actually like to sell to – and leave a voice message that does little more than ask, “Do you have this problem?”

It sounds crazy. And even though I’ve done it a lot, I still get nervous making the calls. But if it is a monetizable pain problem, and you indeed say the problem the right way ( the right specific description using their jargon), to one of the people in the organization who most feels the problem, they call you back. In fact, we use a rule that its not monetizable pain unless 50% of the target customers call you back.

My marketing brethren find this hard to believe at first because they live in a world where a single digit response rate is celebrated. The monetizable pain test, however, is quite different. It’s not a marketing campaign. We’re not selling anything, even if at the end they want to buy. (Which sometimes happens, and that’s an important scenario that I’ll post about soon.)

In fact, there are key things to say in the call that make the differences clear. I will share more in the next post (sorry, I’m not trying to leave anyone hanging, just need to wrap this post.)

Four Important Words

There are important nuances to the call script, and very important structure to the short but sweet interview you do when they call back. For now, I’ll share the most important thing to say in the cold call – probably the four most important words after your problem description – “I’m not selling anything.” This sentence alone distinguishes the process and makes you sound completely different on the phone.

Beware

There is so much more to this so if you decide to try it on your own, please wait until I share more in the next post or contact me. Hopefully you have enough to be interested. Unfortunately this is not quite yet enough to give you meaningful data from the test yet.

Next up: real examples – real results.

Please share in the comments if you have ever tried cold calling target customers…..were you nervous?

Today we held the third Lean Startup Lunch in Silicon Valley at Ephesus in Mountain View. The discussion focused quite a bit on gaming and the challenges of launching a good game. We also discussed how some technical challenges for entrepreneurs have become easier in recent years (versus some that seem to never go away) and how that changes the fundraising game.

One of the attendees was Shirley Lin, the founder of gaming company YoXi123 who shared her insights on the pros and cons of launching on FaceBook versus launching elsewhere, like the iPhone. She mentioned that FaceBook is a bit of its own ecosystem, and its important to know that going in – meaning be prepared to experiment and learn what works. One of the benefits of FaceBook is the ability to experiment with small amounts of targeted advertising to figure out the profile of your sweetspot user, because it’s often not exactly who you think it will be. She offered an example of an entrepreneur who developed an app targted at Foodies, and found that the best predictor of interest in the app was if someone had played a particular Zynga game. And that would have been almost impossible to see coming.

Another discussion was on the ways services like S3 and EC2, and others like it, along with languages that are relatively easier to learn, like Ruby, and services like Heroku have in some ways democratized innovation, compared to older days that were not that long ago. Or add the fact that one or two people can develop and launch an iPhone (or Android) app and begin collecting payment immediately. In many ways this has changed the traditional VC game, and the numbers bear this out.

On the other hand, the discussion raised points on how some things haven’t changed. For venture funding, while it no longer takes (much) money to launch a software company, it still takes a lot of money to scale. The opinion at lunch was this potentially reduces risk for VC’s as they can sit and watch and wait for traction. (Some VC’s I’ve spoken to say it’s not quite that simple – another discussion for another day.)

On the technical side, arguments on which coding language to use will never go away. I shared a story from my very first startup back in the dotcom days of initially building stuff in Perl, and refactoring into C++. There were immediate laughs from two cofounders who had the same argument just yesterday, using Python instead of Perl.

Unfortunately I had to leave early, and the discussion was still going strong. If you were there, or at the Lunch in San Francisco, feel free to share more in the comments.

In Silicon Valley, we know Winter when we see it. The weather cools, there’s less daylight, and it rains a lot. But I’m not talking about the annual winter on the calendar. We’re talking about Startup Winter.

This post is inspired by startup guru Eric Reis who recently offered his own take on current events, with a thoughtful warning that Winter is Coming. Startup Winter occurs when startup financing goes cold. Most people believe we’ve been enjoying a Startup Summer filled with plenty of funding and lucrative exits.

If indeed Winter arrives soon, this will be the third Winter in Silicon Valley since 2000 (including the nuclear winter of the dotcom bust.) Are there any patterns in the previous two downturns that might guide entrepreneurs to survive the next one?

Opportunity Slows but Innovation Doesn’t

During the last two Winters it was hard to get a financing deal done. Venture investors (including many angels) spent more time on portfolio triage and less time on new investments. Expect that pattern to repeat in the next Winter. But the thing you don’t often hear is that even in the nuclear Winter of 2001, series A financings were still happening. Indeed there were way less of them. But the innovation engine never stops, and there was still plenty of dry powder (the name for cash in a downturn) looking for a good home. What does this mean for a Winter entreprenuer?

Stop Thinking “Startup”, Start Thinking “Good Business”

In Summer, financing happens everywhere. We see a sort of gold rush of ideas (which by itself is not a bad thing). But exuberance takes hold, valuations get frothy, and before long we are at a point where numerous “wantrapenuers” are taking something that is really a project, calling it a startup, and successfully raising money. So it’s not totally surprising when a downturn starts draining the water out of Lake Exuberance and suddenly all the sandbars are exposed again.

In Winter, there is still money available, but only for a “good business”. The trick is that the threshold of proof that a startup can become a good business is higher.

What’s a Good Business?

Every venture investor (including VC’s, super-angels, regular angels, or your rich uncle) is different in how they choose to invest. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for a startup to raise money. That said, the true north on the compass for most any Winter investor is demonstrated proof of a repeatable business model. Investors in startups, regardless of season, are always interested when “dollars in” can be connected to “dollars out” in a credible, scalable way. This doesn’t mean you are killing it with revenue yet. But it does mean you can demonstrate on a small but repeatable level that you know exactly where and how to spend money that in turn makes more money.

One way to envision this idea is to take Dave McClure’s AARRR model, and add a thermometer that shows where investment happens according to season:

Needless to say, the dotcom boom set record temperatures. The mid-2000 Web 2.0 bubble was comparably cooler but still pleasantly warm. Summer, as noted on the thermometer, is a time when startups that are able to grow users, but have yet to make subsequent progress beyond Activation, can nonetheless raise plenty of money. In fact, I just met with an entrepreneur last week who is about to launch a social media startup (it’s actually something interesting and new) and is confident in raising money after some level of user growth. Despite my advice, he has little interest in developing, let alone proving, his monetization strategy. So he will have Activation, but the rest of the rows will be zero. He is basically betting there is still time to get over the fundraising mountain before Winter hits.

Repeatable Business Model

No one knows for sure when the next Winter will hit, or how cold it will be. But the point is this – entreprenuers won’t care what season it is if they keep their burn rate low while they work their way down the chart until they get to revenue. This does not require huge overall numbers. The idea is to test, measure and tune each of the core assumptions in business and growth models until you get it right – until you show revenue actually works, with clear elements of scalability. Think of it as iteratively converging on conversion. As Dave McClure says, double down after product-market fit.

Not Risk Capital

Sometimes entrepreneurs get frustrated (or even scoff) at developing greater levels of business proof. Unfortunately, even after locking into a repeatable business model, plenty of risk still remains in the startup before investors have a shot at seeing real ROI. Back when I was raising money for the first time, Chris Marino, who was then founder and CEO of Resonate, gave me great advice – never think of venture capital as risk capital. Investors, even venture investors, aren’t doing this because they love risk. They are just looking to put money to work in a good business. Regardless of the season.

Perhaps the most important observation from the last two Winters is this – Winter does end. And if you play your cards right, you will be one the skiing on all that leftover snow.

Yesterday the Lean Startup Lunch in Silicon Valley was held at Vaso Azzurro in Mountain View. Excellent food, great ambience, and a fun owner who would not let us leave without trying his prized baklava, a la mode no less.

Two interesting discussions emerged over lunch. The first was on how a startup deals with the challenges (and responsibilities) of a business model predicated on some level of trust or credibility between strangers (think of AirBnB, TaskRabbit, Craigslist, eBay, dating sites). The second topic was on the abundance of startups looking for a technical cofounder, with the discussion focused on ways those startups might be able to generate MVPs and get things moving while they try to attract the right person.

For the first topic, the specific question yesterday was how cofounders should determine and then create the necessary level of trust? Interestingly this discussion was not about the AirBnB story (although it was referenced a few times). It came up because of the number of startups (and startup ideas) around SF and the Valley that are focused on better ways for two (or more) people who share an interest to connect online and then take it offline and go do their thing – like go mountain biking or whatever. There are some compelling examples that I won’t share here as they relate to the specifics of each startup’s vision.

One of the cofounders from Wednesdays.com – the startup that arranged the Lean Startup Lunch – offered that they get around the challenge of establishing trust between strangers by focusing on lunch events that are by definition encounters occuring in groups (as opposed to 1 on 1) in known public places (pre-selected restaurants they partner with). Someone else offered the idea of requiring a FaceBook login – as it has certainly cleaned up the comment threads in a a number of popular blogs. There were real reservations expressed; however, as to whether a FB link would (or should) be sufficient for an offline encounter, and under what scenarios. Not to mention the possible business dilemmas of requiring everyone to use FB.

The second topic was just as interesting as the first as we discussed the pros and cons of outsourcing initial development of an MVP, let alone the initial product itself. There are indeed great resources out there like Pivotal Labs along with a host of individuals who do great work like Alvin Wang who attended the lunch. Unfortunately there are way too many others that don’t deliver. (Offshore outsourcing for an early stage startup without a technical cofounder was definitely considered a no-no.) Alvin had an interesting idea of how to perhaps help with this problem, and since its his idea, I will leave that story to him.

Looking forward to the next lunch. Thanks to Rich Collins, Andy Chen and the team at Wednesdays.com for getting this going.

This is a new blog discussing ways to get to product/market fit faster. The first post was written as a humorous (but very real) list of events that often happen inside a startup when you are a cofounder. I think I’ve personally endured every one of those steps myself at some point.

The second post made the point that “overnight success” startups really aren’t. All successful startups had to iterate in some way or another to get there.

This post kicks off a series of methods for accelerating startup iterations with the goal of getting you to product/market fit faster. It’s not theory from a whiteboard. It’s based on things that have been tried, tuned, and effective across a number of companies (well, startups) in Silicon Valley in a variety of markets. Each subsequent post will describe specific things a startup can try (with real examples) to help accelerate product/market fit.

The Top 5 Startup Epitaphs

A struggling startup is painful and exhausting. It can drive an entrepreneur bonkers wondering where it went wrong. Cofounders of a failed startup even go through a grieving process. For all you entrepreneurs who have endured the rough ride of a failed startup (myself included), we would like to help accelerate the journey through the five stages of grief and get you back on the Silicon Valley horse (so to speak). To begin the therapy, here is the ultimate top 5 list of reasons most offered for startup failure…..

“We were __________.”

a hammer looking for a nail.”

a feature looking for a product.”

a “nice to have”, not a “must have.”

before our time.”

very cool, but no one would pay.”

Most of us have heard one or more of these. (#4 happens to be the one I’ve used most.) What’s interesting is if you perform an autopsy on all these modes of failure, a pattern arises. Each of these simple post-mortems is a slightly different expression of the same root cause – a weak customer problem.

Single Biggest Predictor of Success

One of the best ever blog posts on startups is from Marc Andreesen in which he explains why a hot market is more important to startup success than team or product. But even if you agree with his arguments (as I do), there is still a small problem – most entrepreneurs are convinced they are in a hot market. Unfortunately, most of them must be wrong. Otherwise the overall startup success rate would be much higher. So what we need are reliable ways to measure the hotness of a market – as early as possible, ideally before we invest and spend money trying to build a product and a business. More specifically, we need to measure the hotness of a market in such a way that predicts whether a real startup with limited resources (read: limited product features) can actually build a business.

It turns out that the thing you can measure – and what may well be the single biggest predictor of startup success – is the importance of the problem in the eyes of the customer. If you imagine your startup’s product as a rocket, the importance of it’s corresponding customer problem is the fuel. No matter how smart your rocket design, it’s going to need fuel, and quite a bit of it, if it is ever going to achieve escape velocity. Here is the big point – the “if you only remember one thing from reading this” point:

The more important the problem is to your customer, the easier it will be to build a business despite a less-than-perfect product or a less-than-perfect team.

Customer problems that create sufficient fuel to build a business have a special name – Monetizable Pain. It is the idea that a problem needs to be of a certain critical mass if a company that is small, undercapitalized, with no brand, and no track record is going to get those first customers and scale into a good business. If your offering provides relief for Monetizable Pain, you have a real shot at building a business. If it doesn’t, well, it’s going to be a long tough slog as a startup.

Long Tough Slog

The Land of the Long Tough Slog can be hard to see coming. Last week I was meeting with an entrepreneur who had an idea I personally love and honestly could see myself using. He’s been doing Customer Development and asked, “What do I do when it’s tough getting people to take time to talk about the problem?” And, “What does it mean if I have to prompt them quite a bit about the problem before they realize they have it? What if I’m sure they have the problem, but they need convincing?” Suffice it to say there is a lot packed into those questions, including how the entrepreneur is setting up the conversation, talking about the problem, and to whom.

However, if he indeed is doing everything right (which is the topic for the next bunch of posts), then his challenges are in fact signals that he has not found Monetizable Pain. He is instead seeing signposts marking the path to the Land of the Long Tough Slog. It’s a place where the problem you are solving does exist, and you can indeed build a wonderful solution that your hypothetical target users tell you they love. But the underlying customer problem is weak – there is not enough pain there. Or in other words, it’s actually not a hot market. Which means you work darn hard, get nice props from your target customers along the way, yet never get to Product/Market Fit.

Monetizable Pain

The notion of Monetizable Pain is so essential that one can pretty much sort customer problems into two buckets:

“Merely Interesting” problems are smaller. They are attractive but are tough to build a business around. Merely Interesting problems usually come well-disguised with desirable traits that are perfectly designed to woo a budding entrepreneur. A cool solution to a merely interesting problem can generate buzz from the press and bloggers. (Think of Color.) It can get you meetings with prospective customers. It can make your sales people continually talk about how their prospects are really excited about your product. Merely Interesting problems produce recurring sales meetings with stories of the same “interesting” target customers who are always “interested” in your “interesting” product for their “interesting” problem. In fact, those wannabe target customers stay “interested” the entire time they are in the sales funnel – not only this month, but next month, and the month after that too. The problem is not that they aren’t interested – there is lots of interest – the problem is users aren’t growing, and/or nobody’s buying.

Or – some do buy. But at a far smaller deal size or price than you modeled (remember those numbers in your “already conservative” spreadsheet? ) Or users do grow. But slowly. Merely interesting problems put you on a path to startup purgatory that is paved with people who love you but never write a check. Merely interesting problems are great at generating lots of buzz and interest in the free version, but never really deliver conversion to the paid version.

Monetizable Pain as an Accelerator

Monetizable Pain is the exact opposite. A startup that begins with monetizable pain is never characterized as a hammer looking for a nail. It will not be trying to reposition itself as a “must-have” 6 months after launch. It will never sit in the deadpool with the epitaph “we were before our time.” It will not be producing white papers to “educate” target customers on how they are really losing money but they just don’t know it. And it will not need an ROI calculator on its web site.

There are five game changing facets to Monetizable Pain:

You can test a problem to see if it is a Monetizable Pain problem.

The test is fast – days or weeks, not months or years.

You do not need to have a product to perform a test.

You do not need a lot of money to perform a test.

Taken together this means you can iterate quickly on the results and get closer with each test.

Monetizable Pain is such a great predictor of startup success, that it makes sense to test for it and find it before we actually proceed with building anything. It’s the first bridge that must be crossed before taking off on our journey to product market fit and eventually startup success. Once we have validated we have Monetizable Pain, we’ll be ready for the second bridge – how to quickly come up with the winning product spec. (Which is a whole other process – more on that later – or sooner depending on how fast I write…)

If we can test for monetizable pain quickly, and iteratively, without spending a lot of money, we are able to begin our fast, accelerated journey through the loops. How do we do that? I’ll start offering those details in the next post….

Today’s lunch gathered a great group of cofounders and technologists who had not met before but quickly jumped into discussing each others challenges. It always amazes me how a random group of people with startup experience can get together and quickly go deep on real problems. One underlying reason was nearly everyone present was not only familiar with the Lean Startup methodology and Customer Development, but perhaps more importantly, had tried it and came to the table with a shared mindset and language.

The conversation quickly focused on one of the trickiest aspects of the Lean method – how to know when you should pivot versus persevere, which is discussed well in Eric Reis’s upcoming book, The Lean Startup. While I really like how Eric frames the problem and offers one of the best examples of how to solve it (Dave Binetti’s awesome story of Votizen), there is no substitute for working through the problem in your specific situation with fresh thinking from smart, experienced practitioners. That’s what we did today, in between bites of delicious braised tofu and jasmine tea from Cafe Yulong.

Most everybody at the lunch came in with real in-the-trench problems, and walked out with new things to try. One lively discussion was around the specifics of how to talk to prospective target customers during the Customer Development phase. A point that had a lot of pickup was to discern between what a customer (a hypothetical future customer) can reliably tell you, versus what they cannot reliably tell you.

It came down to this – customers can tell you a lot you a lot about their problems, especially if they are important monetizable problems. But they can’t reliably describe or predict the solution they would really use, or what they would pay for it, without actually seeing it or playing with it. In fact, (and I should have said this at the lunch) it actually is a waste of time to ask someone in an interview if they would use a service that would do XYZ. They have no idea if they would really really use it until they actually see more of what you’re thinking. (But I am also not saying you need to build the real product to get reliable feedback……there are definitely cheap quick ways to get reliable feedback on a product before building it, which is part of the idea behind MVP’s. One great thing to ask the target customer is if they are interested enough in the problem to provide feedback on a proposed solution when you have it ready.)

In other words, entrepreneurs first need to go deep on the problem they are targeting by spending time with the real people who feel it most acutely. It is then the entrepreneur’s job to come up with the solution – not the customer’s job.

But here is the good news – that clever, non-obvious breakthrough solution, the one that sells and in hindsight looks deceptively simple, actually becomes more and more apparent as one gets deeper into the problem. Because the entrepreneur who is willing to do the two-tank scuba dive on the problem gets a different view that no one else has – one that looks across multiple customers and can see the problem from different viewpoints. It’s as if these multiple viewpoints taken together shine enough light to finally make an obscure solution visible.

Startups are a lot of work, but it’s moments like that that make it all worth it. Hopefully the people attending the Lean Startup Lunch today got one step closer to their breakthrough.

It was the height of the dotcom boom, and I found myself sitting down for an informal meeting with the one and only Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School. We had hired one of his former students into NetMind, a startup I co-founded. The distinguished Dr. Christensen was in Silicon Valley after publishing “The Innovators Dilemma” and wanted to hear more about our startup journey.

In that meeting Professor Christensen shared a recent insight about startups – a secret to startup success – based on the companies he had seen. As you might imagine, he had my attention. The secrets to startup success are vigorously debated in Silicon Valley. In fact, just sitting down in any Starbucks around here will likely place you in the middle of what often sounds like a sports radio call-in show about startups. You can’t help but overhear “Joe from Palo Alto” ranting like an armchair quarterback about why his startup gig is struggling.

The more informed debates about startup success tend to focus on three factors – product vs market vs team. And since I was pretty familiar with these discussions, I was thinking that just this once I might already know what Dr. Christensen was going to say. Instead, as usual, he said something far more interesting. His insight was that the startups that succeed are simply those that have enough money leftover to try their second idea…….

A Different Growth Model

This was a bit jarring for a first time entrepreneur who was still paddling hard in the murky soup of a first idea. We had taken a sizable venture round, on the premise that our idea, which had a lot of traction with non-paying customers, would soon explode into world domination. In fact, we had even come up with a clever and unique graph to show our trajectory. It looked like this:

Unfortunately, as you perhaps might recall about the dotcom bubble, there were – in fact – just a few other startups that also predicted this same trajectory. Thankfully, we’re all much smarter now and we’ll never do that again……right?…….

The key point Clayton Christensen was making is that successful real startups don’t actually follow that trajectory. He was saying a real startup trajectory might look something more like this:

Real startups that succeed go through a loop first. If you have ever ridden a roller coaster, you know how a loop feels. It spins you around and induces a temporary loss of direction. Which means for startups, this should be a normal and expected feeling. The big trick is to survive the spin cycle.

The Truth About Successful Startups

The idea that a successful startup most often fails before it succeeds is becoming quite popular. But the concept has been alive in the DNA of Silicon Valley for quite awhile. Silicon Valley is really one of the only environments in the world where failure is actually treated like a good thing – but only if you learn from it and keep going.

Because the truth is that Professor Christensen’s initial observation was only half-right. The honest stories of startup success actually get more interesting. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that idea number two also failed. If you talk to the Twitter co-founders, they will tell you it was a long road to their “overnight” success. For most successful startups, the real curve, actually looks a lot more like this:

As if one loop wasn’t enough…… Successful entrepreneurship requires persistence and maybe a big box of Dramamine.

The Real Startup Success Secret

What is the Real Secret of Startup Success? Clayton Christensen was really close. It starts with having the persistence and resources to continue iterating. There is, however, an important detail – you can’t iterate wildly without context or direction. Buckshot doesn’t actually work for startups. But iteration does. Did you notice in the above graph how each successive loop is a little bit higher than the last? That slightly upward ramp is really important. It means you are learning.

Which means if you want to succeed, you have to start your journey with a clear understanding of the critical assumptions in your business, and design in the ability to clearly know which of those assumptions are actually wrong. This is very different from throwing any new idea against the wall and seeing what sticks. An iteration based on this knowledge is called “a pivot” by the Lean Startup community. I got to have dinner with Dave Binetti ,Founder/CEO of Votizen one night and he explains pivots way better than I do.

How to Use the Real Secret

But wait a second. If we know the Real Secret to Startup Success, than why is the failure rate of startups so high? Ah, if only it were so simple. I’ll get into more details (with some great ways to avoid common problems) in ensuing posts. However, our loopy trajectory model exposes two huge reasons:

1) The amount of persistence required to get through the loops is pretty high. It takes a special kind of person with a special level of passion. Even then, each loop is full of drama and emotional issues that can derail a team despite their commitment (which is a topic for other posts).

2) Having enough resources to get through the loops is hard. “Resources” usually means money. It also means time. The traditional method for getting through each loop is to build something that might work, get it out to customers and see what happens. That always takes money (unless you are still living at home and can do it all yourself), and time (unless you happen to be traveling at the speed of light.)

So the model tells us your risky startup is actually a sure thing if you can satisfy three simple conditions:

a) You are unusually persistent by nature, and

b) Your parents will let you have your old bedroom back (for free), and

c) You can make your parents house travel at the speed of light (while you’re inside working away.)

We can all see the obvious problem here ……no pizza delivery car can travel at the speed of light, and let’s face it, you can’t do a startup without pizza. So if you can’t do those three things, fear not, there is a support group for you called “the rest of us.”

How Mere Mortals Use the Real Secret

But what if, (just run with me for a second here)……what if mere mortals working in earth time could accelerate through those loops with minimal time and money? Imagine those dazzling graphs shown above with the X axis representing “Time and Money” (which would be a good thing to imagine because that’s what the axis is.) What if you could somehow compress the graph and do this…..In this scenario, we still accept the journey through the loops as an immutable law of physics for successful startups. Except this time, we magically sprint through those loops, and do it in a way that still picks up the same wisdom and insights that might come from spending more time and more money. To the outside world, it looks like a lucky overnight success, but those of us who were actually on the ride would know we indeed paid our dues and we look smart for a reason. Our success is not about luck.

How do we do that? To travel fast, you have to travel lightly. Everyone who has seen or ridden a motorcycle knows it is far more quick and agile than a car. Yet a motorcycle has a much smaller engine than a car. It gets its speed from traveling lightly. Startups often make the mistake of trying to get the through the loops in a car, or a jeep, or an SUV, or if you were WebVan, a big-ass semi.

What we need are efficient, smart ways to accelerate (that means getting the job done without spending a lot of money or time). We have to accelerate like a rocket or an electron trying to achieve escape velocity. The Lean Startup movement and incubators like Y Combinator preach speed – they are all about being fast through the loops; however, with each post, I plan to walk through specific new stuff you can do that no one else is talking about and will help you accelerate and iterate quickly. (Thus the name…….Smart Fast Startup……)

The first huge accelerator comes from a new concept called Monetizable Pain. It’s something I wish I knew back in those dotcom days during my first startup. Check it out in the next post coming up.

43) Launch the product, but call it “beta” (a term derived from the ancient greek, meaning “this might suck”)

44) Tell your Board it’s a “soft launch”

45) Experience new emotional highs, and new emotional lows – all in the same day.

46) Look for a way to reach customers

47) Discover your “way to reach customers” costs more than what you sell them.

48) Look for a new way to reach customers before the next investor meeting.

49) Realize a startup is very different from having “a job”

50) Prioritize the bug list

51) Prioritize the new feature requests

52) Create an investor pitch deck

53) Get investors to meet with you

54) Feel euphoric as they praise you, smile and say thanks as you leave

55) High five your cofounders in the parking lot

56) Get in the car and say “We killed it!”

57) Shout “We gonna be rich!”

58) Wait for the investors to follow up

59) Wonder why the investors don’t follow up

60) Email them

61) Text them

62) Call them

63) Wonder why the investors don’t follow up

64) Tell your co-founders, “Those VC’s must be knuckleheads”

65) Actually get an interested customer

66) Totally cave on the price

67) Somehow close the deal

68) Feel lucky

69) Go to a friend’s party to unwind

70) Discover everyone at the party thinks Googlers are cool, but…..

71) No one’s impressed with “Founder/CEO of random startup”

72) Meet with more investors

73) Revise your presentation

74) Again

75) And again

76) Tell yourself the investors “who don’t get it” must be stupid

77) Discover investor silence means “probably not”

78) Learn “probably not” means “no”

79) Promise yourself to remember a startup is very different from having “a job”

80) Meet with more investors

81) Receive a term sheet

82) Learn what “participating preferred with a 3x multiple” means (a term derived from the ancient Greek, meaning “indentured servitude”)

83) Negotiate with investors

84) Discover VC’s are very good at negotiating

85) Somehow close the round

86) Feel lucky

87) Get the money in the bank

88) Shout “We gonna be rich!”

89) Receive the legal bill and recite out loud, “Wow we’re in the wrong business”

90) Start trying to hire

91) Realize it’s hard to hire the right people

92) Discover it’s harder to fire the wrong people

93) Realize the firing conversations suck.

94) Promise yourself to remember that a startup is very different from having “a job.”

95) Start holding weekly sales meetings

96) Again

97) And again

98) Wonder how customers all say the same polite excuses for not buying, but….

99) Have completely different feature requests

100) Discover customer silence means “not this fiscal year”

101) Learn “not this fiscal year” means “no”

102) Somehow close a few more deals

103) Feel lucky

104) Hire a few more people

105) Wonder if you are paying too much salary and equity

106) Wonder if you are paying too little salary and equity

107) Feel like you didn’t get anything done today

108) Hold an all-hands meeting. Use the metaphor “it’s a marathon, not a sprint”

109) Secretly hope everyone still sprints

110) Notice one of your cofounders doesn’t seem as capable as he/she used to be

111) Notice everyone else is noticing too

112) Realize you need someone else doing his job

113) Realize that conversation sucks

114) Feel like you’re getting good at conversations that suck

115) Realize most of what’s new in Version 2.0 is really bug fixes from Version 1.0

116) Look back at your original business plan

117) Laugh

118) Look back at your original investor slides

119) Laugh

120) Look back at your “conservative” financial projections

121) Stare wondrously at all that magical profit in year 2

122) Laugh

123) Add up your monthly burn rate

124) Cry

125) Realize you need a business model, not a business plan

126) Feel like you didn’t get anything done this week

127) Spend 4 solid days preparing for a board meeting

128) Announce a change of strategy

129) Call it a pivot

130) Receive a call from your lead investor because she wants to “help” with your “pivot”

131) Begin weekly updates with your lead investor about progress with said “pivot”

132) Try to sound intrigued as lead investor suggests bringing in a new exec to help get you to “the next level”

133) Wonder what she really means by “the next level”

134) Receive an unexpectedly friendly voice message from CEO of a pseudo-competitor

135) Have a remarkably friendly lunch with CEO of pseudo-competitor

136) Be charmed by remarkably friendly CEO as he suggests “working together”

137) Call your lead investor from the car.

138) While you are still driving back to the office, agree to be acquired.

139) Negotiate the title “Chief Business Segment Strategy Development Officer”

140) Promise yourself to remember a startup is very different from having “a job”

But wait, you say – this list is crazy because I already know better than to do a lot of this stuff. Indeed, if you are listening to startup wisdom from people like Eric Reis, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Brant Cooper, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Nathan Furr, and many others, you hopefully saw numerous mistakes in the above list, and already have ideas on how to avoid them. Nonetheless, just about everyone who has been in a startup, even one enlightened by startup wisdom, still identifies with at least some of the above steps.

The good news is there are numerous battle-tested methods for dealing with each of the situations described in the above list. And that is what I hope to deliver in the smartfunstartup.com.

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About Mark Richards

I'm a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in Silicon Valley. My biggest home run was NetMind. I work with tech startups, showing them how to get to product-market-fit quickly, and then how to deal with the new problems that arise after that. Read More…